Kashmir

Like anyone with access to the news, my mind has been much on the disaster on the Indian subcontinent this week. Half my life ago, my family visited Kashmir in one of the very brief spells of relative peace that the region has experienced in decades of conflict. It was a long journey - my brothers and I travelling up from our boarding school in South India, my parents coming west from Bangladesh to meet us. Then another overnight train north to Srinagar.

I had been imbibing M M Kaye novels and arrived in Kashmir with the most inflated expectations of adventure and romance. For once, life surpassed imagination. We stayed in an ornately carved houseboat on the Dal Lake. I remember sitting on the roof, sipping chai, writing in my diary, with the snow-capped mountains reflected in the still water. Later we spent a few days in elaborate, wooden-floored tents up in the hills. The only place I've ever seen fields of flowers. Icy streams ran through carefully constructed stone channels, the force of the water turning tiny mill wheels. One day we went pony riding, and out on one of the roads we were passed by a Kashmiri man on horseback. He was the essence of M M Kaye's romantic heroes - bright blue eyes in a fierce olive face, a curved knife hanging from his belt, galloping past on a mountain pony. My thirteen-year-old heart nearly stopped!

After we left, the hostilities resumed. For years afterwards my parents received plaintive letters from tourist operators in Kashmir, whose livelihoods were being destroyed by the conflict. With kidnappings and bombings in the news, the houseboats on the lake and the tents in the hills were empty. And now this new horror. So much beauty, so much blood.